Happy Valentine’s Day everyone! Valentine’s Day has a whole different meaning now that I’m a parent… in the past, it was all romance and flowers and fancy dinners, and now it’s paper hearts and stuffed animals and little paper Valentine’s cards. And I wouldn’t have it any other way.
The bean and I love crafts, so a holiday is a great excuse to get creative. Here are a few of our favourite Valentine’s Day crafts:
– Cutting out paper hearts. This is a great exercise for little hands that are learning how to use scissors. Fold paper in half, draw half a heart, and let your child cut it out, open it, and decorate or colour it.
– Suncatchers. You can fill a plastic yogurt lid with school glue, add a few drops of food colouring, and swirl with a toothpick. When it dries punch a hole in the top of it and hang it in a window. You can also do a cool suncatcher with crayon shavings: sandwich different coloured crayon shavings between two pieces of wax paper, and then iron (on the lowest setting). It will immediately melt in a super cool swirly fashion. Then we cut ours out into hearts.
Paper plate cardholder. Take two paper plates and punch holes halfway around the outside of the plates. Lace yarn in and out of the holes to affix the two plates together. Cut a flat opening across the top and decorate with hearts. Add a string so your little one can carry their cardholder over their shoulder.
Simple store-bought cards. We went to our local dollar store and picked up a few packs of Valentine’s Day cards, then came home to write them out, colour on them, add stickers, etc.
Love animals. We have a bag of differently-sized foam hearts that we’ve used to create all sorts of Valentine’s Day-inspired animals. We made fish and used the hearts as fins and lips, we made butterflies and used the bigger hearts for wings, and we even made little lovebirds with heart-shaped tails.
A full-time work-from-home mom, Jennifer Cox (our “Supermom in Training”) loves dabbling in healthy cooking, craft projects, family outings, and more, sharing with Suburban readers everything she knows about being an (almost) superhero mommy.